Michael Beauchamp-Cohen is a Michigan-bred songwriter, musician, and performer best known for his decade-plus collaboration with Laurel Premo in the roots duo Red Tail Ring. In both RTR and as a solo artist, Beauchamp-Cohen writes lyrically dense, unconventional folk songs that explore personal subjects made universal through the process of their transmission. In Beauchamp-Cohen’s music the introspective loneliness of a fall day morphs into a plea to rise above the present political bifurcation; a small moment alone in the forest spurs broader analysis on the emptiness of consumerism; personal insecurities hold up the mirror on small-town life. And at other times, of course, the experience of being bedeviled by love is in itself universally understood and cathartically unpacked in a crowd.
Beauchamp-Cohen (who legally added -Cohen in 2015 to honor his beloved step-dad) has performed over 1,000 shows at a variety of festivals and venues while traveling on three continents since his solo debut in 2008. Past performances include the Wheatland Music Festival (Michigan), Port Fairy Folk Festival (Australia), Haapavesi Folk (Finland), Bluegrass Jamboree (Germany), and Red Wing Roots (Virginia). He has shared stages with peers such as May Erlewine, Joan Shelley, and The Steel Wheels, and luminaries Joel Mabus, John McCutcheon, and Michael Smith.
“It all began when I was 13 with a piece of lined paper on which my step-dad wrote out how to play the five basic chord shapes. After that it was just me and the radio. Me and Chuck Berry, me and Tom Petty, Robby Krieger, Doc Watson, The Beatles, Nirvana, Pavement, Cat Power, Nick Drake, on and on and on. My family had to make a rule that I couldn’t play during movies, but I’d always get out my guitar and play along with the end credits. I listened as widely as I could, from my Mom’s Broadway and new wave to my step-dad’s bluegrass; from my dad’s southern rock and delta blues to my many sisters’ punk, slacker rock and riot girl; to everyone’s Bob Dylan, always.
“In college, I attended an off-site program in the Northeast called the New England Literature Program (NELP), studying Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman, and the like. That experience, cloistered away amidst the rugged beauty of Maine, without a scrap of technology for two months, helped me make an essential connection between poetry and music. The music I loved, the stuff that really broke me down, I realized, at its core was indistinguishable from poetry. Leonard Cohen and Bonnie “Prince” Billy both shared the aching sparseness of William Carlos Williams, Joni Mitchell and Jack Kerouac existed in the same rambling disaffection, Bob Dylan and Lawrence Ferlinghetti both lyrically played with language, colloquialisms, and timing in radical ways - the supreme marriage of mediums coalesced in my mind and in my hands, and I started writing.” - MBC
Beauchamp-Cohen (who legally added -Cohen in 2015 to honor his beloved step-dad) has performed over 1,000 shows at a variety of festivals and venues while traveling on three continents since his solo debut in 2008. Past performances include the Wheatland Music Festival (Michigan), Port Fairy Folk Festival (Australia), Haapavesi Folk (Finland), Bluegrass Jamboree (Germany), and Red Wing Roots (Virginia). He has shared stages with peers such as May Erlewine, Joan Shelley, and The Steel Wheels, and luminaries Joel Mabus, John McCutcheon, and Michael Smith.
“It all began when I was 13 with a piece of lined paper on which my step-dad wrote out how to play the five basic chord shapes. After that it was just me and the radio. Me and Chuck Berry, me and Tom Petty, Robby Krieger, Doc Watson, The Beatles, Nirvana, Pavement, Cat Power, Nick Drake, on and on and on. My family had to make a rule that I couldn’t play during movies, but I’d always get out my guitar and play along with the end credits. I listened as widely as I could, from my Mom’s Broadway and new wave to my step-dad’s bluegrass; from my dad’s southern rock and delta blues to my many sisters’ punk, slacker rock and riot girl; to everyone’s Bob Dylan, always.
“In college, I attended an off-site program in the Northeast called the New England Literature Program (NELP), studying Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman, and the like. That experience, cloistered away amidst the rugged beauty of Maine, without a scrap of technology for two months, helped me make an essential connection between poetry and music. The music I loved, the stuff that really broke me down, I realized, at its core was indistinguishable from poetry. Leonard Cohen and Bonnie “Prince” Billy both shared the aching sparseness of William Carlos Williams, Joni Mitchell and Jack Kerouac existed in the same rambling disaffection, Bob Dylan and Lawrence Ferlinghetti both lyrically played with language, colloquialisms, and timing in radical ways - the supreme marriage of mediums coalesced in my mind and in my hands, and I started writing.” - MBC
